Contenu font family

About Contenu font family

This new font family is a culmination of over forty years of learning typography and nearly two decades of font design. Contenu is the new book font family designed for an upcoming book on book font family design. The name is French for content and this is what the family is designed for: text, body copy, and book layout. If it has a style is it a modern take on oldstyle serif font loosely based on using Jenson as a mask. My original inspiration was a little font that came with my old LaserMaster printer which I bought for my commercial printing program in the early 1990s. It was called Minister. I was originally under the impression that it was an old Dutch Bible font. It is easy to see now that it was a loose copy of the original by Fahrenwaldt. Linotype (the owner of Minister's copyright) writes that Minister was based on Garalde types with an oblique stress, wide caps, and strongly concave serifs. I have no idea which fonts he used for his inspiration. Contenu comes from these roots, though it has gone far afield in the past couple of decades. It is my own and does what I want it to do.